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Two and a Half Men to end 12-year run

Jon Cryer, left, and Ashton Kutcher star in Two and a Half Men which is ending its run on CBS. (Sonja Flemming)

By Christopher PalmeriEdmund LeeBloomberg

Wed., May 14, 2014

LOS ANGELES —Two and a Half Men, once the highest-rated TV comedy in the U.S., is ending its run with a 12th and final season as broadcaster CBS revamps its lineup to win back younger viewers.

The show, which starred Charlie Sheen until he was replaced by Ashton Kutcher in 2011, will retain its slot on Thursdays at 9 p.m. EDT, the network said in a statement. Series creator Chuck Lorre “will be creating a season-long event to send it off,” said Nina Tassler, the network’s head of entertainment.

“It’s important to keep your fans engaged,” she said Wednesday at a CBS news conference in New York.

CBS is seeking to regain ground it lost last season to NBC and Fox. While CBS is still the most-watched network, it had the largest ratings decline for younger audiences among the big four broadcast networks in the past season, with average nightly viewers falling 18 per cent to about three million in the 18-to-49-year-old demographic, according to Nielsen data.

Though Two and a Half Men continued to appear regularly among the top 25 programs in the ratings after the transition to Kutcher, it had been surpassed by CBS hits like The Big Bang Theory. Sheen was fired from the show after making disparaging comments about Lorre.

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CBS’s ratings drop last season was largely due to a lack of sports programming such as professional football and college basketball championship games, as well as the failure of shows Hostages and Intelligence in the 10 p.m. Monday time slot, said Kelly Kahl, the network’s senior executive vice-president of prime-time programming.

“That’s 95 per cent of the issue,” Kahl said.

Help is on the way. In February, CBS won rights to televise eight National Football League games on Thursday nights. The series of games begins Sept. 11, with Two and a Half Men and other shows replacing the games starting Oct. 30.

“It keeps the integrity of our Thursday lineup, but gives us a boost at the start of the season,” Kahl said.

The addition of the eight-game NFL package and summer series Under the Dome and Extant illustrates the changing nature of broadcast TV, when new shows can be introduced at any point in the year rather than the traditional September-to-May season, CBS chief executive officer Les Moonves said at the news conference.

For example, the network is planning a late-in-the-season remake of The Odd Couple, featuring Friends star Matthew Perry and Thomas Lennon of Reno 911! as the mismatched roommates.

“There will be time periods when there are no repeats for the entire season,” Moonves said. “That is a great luxury that we have. Having football makes it better.”

Despite intense interest from fans of the hit show How I Met Your Mother, which concluded a nine-year run this year, the network decided not to pick up the pilot for a spinoff series, How I Met Your Dad, put together by the same producers.

“There were things with the pilot that didn’t work out,” Tassler said. The creative team declined the network’s request to redo the episode, she said.

The network’s sole new fall comedy, The McCarthys, stars Tyler Ritter as a gay man at odds with his traditional Boston family.

CBS introduced five new shows for its fall season, a small number compared with last-place ABC, which introduced 12 new series Wednesday.

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